Making Things Go Together
Some thoughts on outfit-repeating, intuition, and transition
On the last day of February, I reviewed my outfit pictures for my monthly outfit recap I had planned to share here. I added the pictures to an album and scrolled through, “hearting”, deleting, and trying to distill them into something legible and worth sharing. My February outfits felt repetitive and therefore uninteresting. It occurred to me then: perhaps the repetition is actually the most interesting thing about what I wore in February. This realization prompted me to write this essay and make these collages. This is a post about personal style without any pictures of me.
I’ve always been an outfit repeater, and I subscribe to the belief that clothes are meant to be worn. I don’t have clothing reserved only for special occasions. The things I love the most are subjected to the wear and tear of my everyday life. They become personalized in this way; the clothes become more “me” the more they spend time with one another on my body, acquiring stains and scuffs, and molding to my shape.
In February I outfit-repeated more than usual, partially due to the cold weather. When I identified a look that felt appropriately warm, I settled on it for a few days, making only slight adjustments with each day of wear.
I identified my 3 most-repeated outfits and decided to recreate them as collages, using images of the clothing with Pantone chips representing the outfit’s color palette. As I cut, paste, and arrange, I wonder: what happens when I remove myself from the image entirely? Has my repetitive wear made these looks “me” enough to hold my shape when I’m not there?
I’ve long felt drawn to unexpected or clashing combinations of colors, patterns, textures, and vibes and I love the challenge of making them “go together”. (Zebra stripes & polka dots or saddle shoes & tie-dye, for instance!) Sometimes an outfit of disparate parts won’t feel perfectly right the first time I wear it, but the more I repeat the outfit, it starts to make sense, like it goes together more the more times I assert its going together into being. Perhaps my pattern-clashing outfit clashes less on Day 3 of outfit repetition than it did on Day 1.
When I look at my collages of my 16 most worn items, I note the cohesion. The act of making things go together is an intuitive process. It’s an intuitive knowing that transcends what can be taught in a color theory lesson. And like most intuitive processes, it’s deeply personal. What goes together for me might not go together for you. Witnessing a cohesion between visual elements is satisfying, but witnessing a greater cohesion of style, vibe, and gendered expression gives me peace.
Earlier in my gender journey, getting dressed was often angst-ridden and emotionally charged. At moments in my 20s my most worn outfit was jeans and a black tee shirt, yet my closet was filled with an eccentric smattering of clothing across gender expressions. “Eccentric” not in a fun, gender-creative way, but rather— clouded, frustrated. It felt safer to settle for a simple outfit that would allow me to be read as masculine than to attempt to wrangle my complicated closet and risk feeling misunderstood. I felt burdened by a closet that didn’t go together with itself and that didn’t go together with me.
With age and progression in my transition, I’ve ridded my closet of items that don’t reflect me. But I still own and wear a handful of pieces I wore when I was a girl. At 30, I’m still a work in progress, but my wardrobe has been condensed in alignment with greater clarity about my gender and personal style. For the most part, I know what I like and what I want to have on my body, and I feel grateful to have cultivated a trust of my intuition. I didn’t approach the styling of these looks with words for what I was doing. I trusted my gut and just put clothes on my body (what an idea!).
When I look at these collages, I see myself, my taste, my personality, my masculinity. They hold my shape when I’m not there. I wear the clothes, they don’t wear me. The more I wear my clothes, the more me they become. The more my clothes are worn together, the more they go together.
The me shifts. The wardrobe evolves accordingly. The clothes are worn, sweated on, broken in, scuffed, stained. Repeat.
In my effort to become a student of my own impulses, I extracted color palettes from the individual outfits and from the 15 most worn pieces. What can I learn from my own intuitive styling wisdom if I condense it into only the formal qualities?
Now, time to design something with this palette…
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